Choosing the Right Web Hosting Provider for Now and the Future

by
Bobby Graham

You're starting a website and/or an online business on a shoestring, so you're going to go with the least expensive web host you can find, right? Wrong. Keep reading to find out why this could be the most expensive mistake you ever make.</span>

When most people want to start an online business, they shop around online to see what web hosting businesses are available. A lot of them end up going with a "budget" service that only costs a few bucks a month. While this is all well and good, what exactly are you getting yourself into when you pick a host solely on price? If you are starting an Internet business or expanding your current business to the Internet, then this website is going to be very important to your business, and is going to need the ability to grow as your business does.

I can tell you from first hand experience that there is virtually a ton of "budget" web hosting companies out there. These companies offer you tons of disk space, and virtually unlimited bandwidth, at prices starting as ridiculously low as $0.99 a month. Yes, I've seen them for less than a dollar a month. At prices like that, you need to stop and ask yourself, how do they REALLY make money? Obviously, they count on sheer volume in order to turn a profit. But what if they have 2000 customers, each paying $1 a month? So they bring in $2000 a month. Do you think they can REALLY guarantee each user that huge pipe of bandwidth?

No. They certainly can not. That's why a majority of these budget web hosts have a reputation for being slow. And even a modest website, without a ton of graphics, will still load slowly if the web server it is hosted on is serving slowly due to CPU or bandwidth issues.

This is vitally important to businesses on the Internet. With high-speed Internet access becoming ever more widespread, people are less apt to wait for a website to load. A slow web service provider can be considered the touch of death, and can take an excellent business idea and turn it into an abysmal flop.

But this only scratches the surface of the issues faced when finding the right host to serve your business.

Depending on the kind of business you are starting, there are different potential needs you may have, going forward.

For example, Web-hosting-articles.com (reviewer of web hosting companies) show that if you own a store and are trying to help attract customers, you might begin by creating an online showcase of your products. You might want nothing fancy, just something to entice people to either call to place an order on the phone, or even to come into your store. So a web host who provides the ability for HTML and images is all you need.

But what about when your business grows, or a lot of your customers express the desire to actually order their products online? Well, for starters, you're going to need the ability to have a shopping cart system on your site. This can be a potential issue, as well.

There are many scripting languages available for websites. This being the case, I'm sure you can imagine that all of the shopping cart applications that have already been written are programmed in many different languages. So by paying attention to your web host's available scripting languages, you can ensure that when the time comes that you need a shopping cart (or any other kind of script), your host will be able to support it.

But shopping carts aren't the only thing to worry about. If your site deals with audio or video (maybe you're a professional DJ or videographer, and want to show samples of your work online), you might need the ability for the customers to hear a sample sound-clip, or to view a sample video. In this case, you are going to want to be able to stream audio and/or video from your site. Again, some hosts have this option within their hosting packages, and some don't. If this is something that you might eventually need, it's smart to hook up with a host who offers it, right from the beginning.

Now that we've covered functionality, which is a REALLY good point, we come to another one: having room to grow.

Didn't we just cover this? Didn't we just talk about having the functionality we might need to expand down the road? The answer to this is yes and no. We DID talk about the web hosting provider having the features you need, but that's not what I'm alluding to.

Picture this. You put up your website, do a little advertising, and it's a complete hit. Customers flock to your site, and you find yourself upgrading your site with new functionality a few months later. With more functionality comes even more traffic. Next thing you know, your website starts to run super slow. There are just too many visitors to your site for your web hosting provider's web server to handle.

So what are your options? Well, they are to either a) move to a web server with less customers on it (which might be a premium plan, if your web hosting provider offers it), or b) move to a dedicated server. The benefits of a web server with fewer websites running on it should be obvious. This should become more apparent when you understand that a single server supporting shared hosting accounts (which is the standard inexpensive hosting account) can have literally HUNDREDS of websites on it.

A dedicated server is just what it sounds like. It's a whole web server dedicated to only you and your company. Yes, this is more expensive, but by the time you need this level of service, it should more than pay for itself.

About the Author

Marketing Director for http://www.web-hosting-articles.com.

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